How to replace the Unicode gem on Ruby 1.9?

Question

Unfortunately, the Unicode 0.1 (sudo gem install unicode) doesn't work on Ruby 1.9. I have the following snippet:

require "rubygems"
require "unicode"

str = "áéíóúç"
Unicode.normalize_KD(str).gsub(/[^\x00-\x7F]/n, "")
#=> aeiouc

I use it to convert titles to permalink, without removing accented characters.

Is there a way of converting such texts using pack or unpack methods?

Answer 1

Update: a better option may be to use the gem unicode_utils that was created specifically for these missing features:

require "unicode_utils"
UnicodeUtils.nfkd("áéíóúç").gsub(/[^\x00-\x7F]/,'').to_s
#=> "aeiouc"

---

Is there a possibility you can depend on Rails' ActiveSupport? Then you can do the following:

require "activesupport"
mb_str = ActiveSupport::Multibyte::Chars.new("áéíóúç")
mb_str.normalize(:kd).gsub(/[^\x00-\x7F]/,'').to_s
#=> "aeiouc"

ActiveSupport::Multibyte was written to bring UTF-8/Unicode support to Ruby 1.8, but works fine in 1.9 too. You may be able to borrow some of the code if you don't want it as an external dependency.